Introduction

Football is not exceptional because it commodifies childhood; it is exceptional because it makes visible processes of anticipation that increasingly characterise capitalism more broadly. Like many extractive global industries, football systematically values the commodity while obscuring the labour, care and social infrastructures that produce it.

Scholarship on Afrikan football has increasingly moved beyond celebratory narratives of sporting success towards more critical analyses of football as a political and economic institution. Scholars have situated Afrikan football within broader histories of colonialism, labour migration, commercialisation and global governance (Akindes, 2011; Cornelissen, 2011; Darby, 2007). Yet most studies begin with migration or professional contracts. This article argues that the political economy of Afrikan football begins much earlier: in childhood itself. This is long before migration or professional contracts. I describe this phenomenon as speculative childhood.

Speculative childhood refers to the incorporation of children’s future productive capacity into circuits of commercial calculation, institutional competition and financial anticipation long before they become professional workers. The concept does not imply that football academies are inherently exploitative or that international sporting careers should be discouraged. Rather, it identifies a structural shift in which childhood itself increasingly becomes subject to market valuation.

Elite football like most sports increasingly operates through this anticipation of future value. Across West, North and Southern Afrika, children are identified, monitored and evaluated through academy systems, scouting tournaments, private intermediaries and transnational recruitment networks years before they are eligible to enter professional football. Although FIFA’s Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Playersprohibit most international transfers of minors, the commercial identification of talent frequently begins much earlier. Childhood therefore becomes incorporated into a global economy organised around projected future productivity rather than present performance. The frontier of extraction has shifted. Increasingly, it is not only Afrika’s land, minerals or labour that are anticipated by global markets, but Afrikan childhood itself.

Rather, it identifies a structural transformation in which childhood itself increasingly acquires economic value through the anticipation of future performance as Twum -Danso outlines(Twum-Danso Imoh, 2013; 2020 ).

Drawing on feminist political economy, Afrikan political economy and critical childhood studies, this article  utilises ‘speculative childhood’ theory to explain how Afrikan boyhood becomes incorporated into the global football economy long before young players enter professional labour markets. By foregrounding social reproduction rather than transfer markets, it shows that football talent is not discovered but collectively produced through years of unpaid care, community investment and public provision. The work  engages with  contemporary scholarship by Awino Okech, Sara Salem, Yolande Bouka, Shirin Rai and Bina Agarwal on power, social reproduction, mobility and care under contemporary capitalism (Okech, 2020; Salem, 2020; Bouka, 2021; Rai, 2013; Agarwal, 1997).

Although childhood has long been recognised as socially and economically constructed, this article departs from existing scholarship by foregrounding anticipation rather than exchange. Viviana Zelizer’s  pioneering work demonstrated that children have long occupied complex positions within economic life rather than existing outside markets (Zelizer, 1985). This article extends that insight by arguing that contemporary football increasingly commodifies not children’s present labour but their anticipated future capability. What is being valued is not the child as worker but the possibility that the child may one day become commercially valuable.

Football provides one of the clearest illustrations of this transformation. Across West, North, East and Southern Afrika, boys are identified through grassroots tournaments, academies, school competitions, private intermediaries and transnational scouting networks years before they are eligible to play professionally. Although FIFA regulations prohibit most international transfers of minors, the commercial identification of talent begins much earlier. The object of investment is no longer simply the professional footballer; it is the future footballer. Childhood itself becomes incorporated into a global economy organised around projected future productivity.

The consequences extend beyond sport. Football is now one of the few global industries in which large numbers of Afrikan boys are recognised not primarily as future citizens, students or workers, but as future financial assets. Families invest scarce household resources in training, travel and equipment. Communities organise around the promise of exceptional talent. Scouts, academies and agents compete to identify potential before rivals do. Hope itself becomes economically organised. Yet while the possibility of extraordinary success receives considerable attention, far less scrutiny has been given to the unequal distribution of the risks that accompany this speculative economy.

Understanding those risks requires shifting our analytical lens from football markets to the social worlds that produce footballers. Before an Afrikan player becomes commercially valuable, years of unpaid and under-recognised labour have already been invested by mothers, families, schools, local clubs, coaches, neighbourhoods and public institutions. The football economy depends upon these forms of social reproduction, yet they remain almost entirely absent from football’s financial accounting. Patricia McFadden, Sara Salem, Shirin Rai and Bina Agarwal remind us of this (McFadden, 1992; Salem, 2020; Rai, 2013; Agarwal, 1997). The transfer fee recognises the player only after the most fundamental work has already been done.

This article therefore makes three interconnected arguments. First, it argues that Afrikan boyhood has become increasingly incorporated into a speculative economy in which children’s futures are valued long before they become professional athletes. Second, drawing on feminist political economy, it shows that football talent is not naturally endowed but socially produced through extensive processes of care, education and community investment that remain economically invisible. Finally, it argues that the unequal distribution of risk and reward begins in childhood itself: Afrikan families and communities absorb the costs and uncertainties of producing football talent, while the greatest commercial returns are realised elsewhere. In this sense, the global football economy reproduces a familiar colonial political economy: Afrika finances the production of value while others retain the institutions through which that value is accumulated.

By relocating the political economy of football to childhood rather than migration, this article shifts attention from the transfer market to the production of human capability itself. Before there is a contract, there is a child. Before there is a transfer fee, there are years of care, sacrifice and social investment. The global football economy begins not at the moment a player leaves Afrika, but at the moment Afrikan boyhood becomes an object of economic anticipation.

Speculative Childhood: The Political Economy of Anticipation

Most analyses of Afrikan football begin when young players enter professional labour markets through migration, academy recruitment or international transfers. While these approaches have generated important insights into labour mobility, exploitation and global sporting inequalities they begin their analysis only after the most significant political-economic work has already taken place (Darby, 2007; Akindes, 2011; Cornelissen, 2011). By the time a young Afrikan footballer signs a professional contract, years of investment, evaluation and social reproduction have already transformed him into a commercially desirable asset.

This article therefore shifts the analytical starting point from migration to childhood. It argues that the incorporation of children’s future productive capacity into circuits of commercial calculation, institutional competition and financial anticipation long before they become professional workers. The market no longer waits for footballers to emerge. It actively seeks to identify, evaluate and secure future value while that value is still embodied in children.

This speculative logic has become central to elite football. Across West, North, East and Southern Afrika, boys are identified through school tournaments, neighbourhood competitions, academy trials, youth leagues and increasingly sophisticated scouting networks. Their technical ability, physical growth, athletic potential and psychological attributes are monitored years before they are legally eligible to sign professional contracts. Clubs, intermediaries and academies compete not simply for talented players but for the possibility of future appreciation. Like financial investors purchasing assets before they mature, football institutions seek to secure talent before its market value escalates.

Importantly, speculative childhood does not imply that football academies are inherently exploitative or that international careers should be discouraged. Many academies provide high-quality coaching, education and opportunities that have transformed the lives of thousands of Afrikan players and their families. Nor does every young footballer become subject to commercial exploitation. Rather, the concept draws attention to a broader structural transformation in which childhood itself increasingly becomes organised around anticipated future economic value.

Football is particularly revealing because its speculative dynamics are unusually visible. Unlike many other sectors, football openly assigns monetary values to future potential through scouting systems, academy recruitment, transfer markets and player development pathways. Yet similar dynamics increasingly characterise other areas of the contemporary economy, where children are assessed, ranked and cultivated according to their projected future productivity. Football therefore provides a powerful lens through which to examine wider processes of commodification under contemporary capitalism.

The Afrikan context gives this process particular significance. The continent has become one of the world’s most important producers of elite football talent, supplying players to leagues across Europe, North America, the Gulf and increasingly Asia. Yet the identification of this talent begins long before migration. Across neighbourhood pitches, municipal leagues and local academies, Afrikan boys are increasingly viewed through the language of potential, promise and future value.   not simply observe children playing football; they assess future market possibilities often parading them online disturbingly, like chattel.  The gaze is not neutral. It is organised through a political economy that increasingly treats Afrikan boys as repositories of future commercial value.

The consequences are profound. Once a boy is recognised as possessing exceptional footballing potential, his childhood is often reorganised around that possibility. Schooling, family finances, mobility, daily routines and community expectations increasingly orient themselves towards a future professional career that remains statistically improbable. The child is not yet a worker, yet his future labour has already begun to shape present decisions. His value lies less in who he is today than in who markets believe he may become tomorrow.

Football migration does not occur across a neutral global landscape. Recruitment networks have developed through layered histories of empire, language, migration policy, diaspora formation and institutional relationships that continue to shape contemporary football markets. In some cases, these routes clearly reflect colonial histories, as seen in longstanding recruitment links between Senegal and France, Mali and France, Morocco and France or Spain, and Lusophone Afrikan countries and Portugal. In other cases, contemporary pathways are less directly colonial and are instead organised through the commercial strategies of academies, intermediary clubs, migration regimes, linguistic affinities, established diasporas and global scouting networks.

The geography of Afrikan football migration is therefore best understood not as a simple continuation of colonialism, but as an evolving infrastructure in which historical imperial connections intersect with newer commercial and institutional forms of global football governance. Empire did not disappear from football; it changed organisational form. Colonial infrastructures have been reconfigured into commercial recruitment infrastructures.

This speculative orientation fundamentally alters how we understand the political economy of Afrikan football. Rather than beginning with migration, the global football economy begins with anticipation. Before there is a transfer fee, there is projection. Before there is a contract, there is expectation. Before there is a professional footballer, there is an Afrikan boy whose future has already entered the calculations of families, scouts, academies and global football markets.

Producing the Footballer: Social Reproduction and our Mothers

The speculative economy of football obscures a more fundamental question: where does a footballer come from? Elite football often presents talent as something that is discovered—a rare gift identified by scouts and refined through professional coaching. This language of discovery conceals the long social process through which footballers are actually produced. Before an Afrikan boy is recognised by an academy or signs his first professional contract, years of unpaid labour, public investment and collective care have already shaped the capabilities that later acquire commercial value.

Feminist political economists have long argued that economies depend upon forms of labour that remain systematically undervalued because they occur outside conventional markets. Patricia McFadden and  Rama Salla Dieng remind us that human capability is neither spontaneous nor naturally occurring (McFadden, 1992; Dieng, 2022). It is produced through the everyday work of social reproduction: feeding children, caring for illness, supporting education, maintaining households, nurturing confidence, building communities and sustaining the conditions under which human beings are able to flourish. Markets depend upon this labour, yet rarely recognise or reward it. What remains invisible in football accounting is not incidental; it is precisely the hidden subsidy upon which profitable accumulation depends.

Football offers a striking illustration of this insight. Before an Afrikan boy ever appears before a scout across sports, countless people have already contributed to his development. Mothers wake before dawn to prepare meals and uniforms. Fathers, grandparents and extended families find money for boots, transport and tournament fees despite precarious household incomes. The feminist economics of this process are particularly important  including the labour that makes  transfers possible ((Agarwal, 1997; McFadden, 1992) Much of the labour that sustains aspiring footballers is undertaken by women whose work remains both unpaid and unrecognised. Mothers and grandmothers frequently become the logistical and emotional infrastructure of football careers, organising household budgets around training schedules, travelling long distances to matches, preparing food, washing kits and sustaining children through inevitable disappointments and injuries. Teachers accommodate absences for competitions. School coaches volunteer evenings and weekends. Community clubs organise leagues on poorly maintained municipal pitches. Public schools provide spaces in which sporting talent first emerges, while clinics and public health systems help maintain children’s physical wellbeing. Neighbours, siblings and friends contribute time, encouragement and emotional support. These investments rarely appear in football’s financial accounting, yet they are indispensable to the production of football talent. Global football therefore reproduces the oldest logic of capitalism: the systematic appropriation of Black women’s reproductive labour without equivalent recognition or remuneration.

Football talent, then, is not an individual possession. Nor is it simply a biological gift waiting to be discovered. It is a socially produced capability. Every successful footballer embodies years of collective labour undertaken largely outside the market. The global football economy depends upon this labour while simultaneously rendering it invisible.

This invisibility reflects a broader pattern within global capitalism. As feminist political economy has consistently demonstrated, the costs of producing human capability are frequently borne by households and communities, while the returns are realised elsewhere. Football reproduces this logic with remarkable clarity. Afrikan families absorb the costs of raising children. Local clubs invest years in coaching and player development. Public institutions contribute education, healthcare and sporting infrastructure. Yet the greatest commercial returns are often captured only after the player enters international football markets.

Their labour is indispensable to the production of football talent, yet it disappears entirely once that talent enters commercial markets. Transfer fees compensate clubs and agents; they do not recognise the years of care that made those transfers possible. As Bina Agarwal has argued in different development contexts, household provisioning is not simply an economic activity but one deeply shaped by unequal access to resources, decision-making power and social norms ((Agarwal, 1997). Football illustrates these dynamics vividly. Women frequently absorb the hidden costs of producing future footballers while remaining entirely absent from football’s commercial accounting.

Nor is social reproduction confined to the household. Across Afrika, football is deeply embedded within neighbourhoods, churches, schools, youth clubs and informal associations that create spaces in which boys develop technical ability, discipline, confidence and collective identity. These institutions perform far more than recreational functions. They cultivate forms of human capability that later underpin one of the world’s most lucrative sporting industries. The production of football talent is therefore not simply an individual achievement but a collective social accomplishment.

Recognising football as socially reproduced also changes how we understand value itself. Conventional football economics tends to locate value at the moment of transfer or contract, when players acquire an explicit market price. A feminist political economy perspective suggests a different chronology. The most important investments occur long before the market assigns monetary value. By the time a European club purchases an Afrikan footballer, the most labour-intensive stage of production has already been completed. What appears as the acquisition of talent is, in reality, the acquisition of years of accumulated social investment.

Seen in this light, the familiar claim that Afrika “exports talent” is profoundly incomplete. Afrika does not simply export footballers. It exports socially produced human capability and, with it, the cumulative investments of households, communities and systems of care (McFadden, 1992; Ossome, 2021; Salem, 2020).

It also exports value already created. Europe purchases finished capability while rarely paying the full social costs of its production. Embedded within every player are years of unpaid care, public expenditure, community commitment and institutional investment that remain largely invisible once the footballer enters global circuits of commercial accumulation. Before Europe discovers talent, Afrikan societies have already created it.

This perspective also reframes the political economy of football migration. The central issue is not merely that players leave the continent. It is that the costs of producing football talent and the rewards generated by that talent are geographically and institutionally separated. Afrikan households and communities shoulder the uncertainties of development, while global football increasingly captures the returns. Understanding this separation requires us to move beyond the language of talent alone and towards the politics of social reproduction, where the real foundations of football’s global economy are laid.

The Unequal Burden of Hope: Speculative Football Economy

Speculative childhood redistributes more than economic value; it redistributes risk. While elite football clubs diversify uncertainty across hundreds of young prospects, Afrikan households often concentrate that uncertainty within a single child. In many communities, one gifted boy comes to embody not only his own aspirations but also the hopes of an extended family. Football becomes more than a game. It becomes an imagined pathway out of poverty, unemployment and structural exclusion. This also carries  gender stratified impacts. Scholars of Afrikan masculinities, including Kopano Ratele, Robert Morrell and Tamara Shefer, have shown how boys frequently come to understand successful adulthood through expectations of provision, achievement and responsibility (Ratele, 2016; Morrell, 2001; Shefer, 2017). Football intensifies these expectations by presenting exceptional sporting success as one of the few globally visible pathways through which young men might fulfil these socially constructed obligations. This burden of expectation, as Tamara Shefer and Yolande Bouka variously demonstrate in different contexts, is inseparable from the broader political economy(Shefer, 2017; Bouka, 2021).

Across much of the continent, young men confront persistently high rates of unemployment, shrinking opportunities for secure work and education systems that often struggle to translate qualifications into livelihoods. In this context, elite football appears to offer one of the few globally visible routes to social mobility. Families do not simply invest in football because they love the game. They invest because the alternatives are often profoundly constrained. Hope itself becomes financialised, transforming aspiration into one of the most powerful yet least recognised mechanisms through which unequal global markets reproduce themselves. Although this article focuses on the Afrika region Afrikan  countries are not  alone in converting racialised aspiration into sporting labour. Across Brazil and Latin America, and within Black communities in the United States, families similarly invest hope in sons (and daughters)whose bodies and capabilities may offer one of the few visible routes to mobility. These sporting economies are rooted in different but connected histories of slavery, colonialism, segregation and racial capitalism: communities produce the talent, absorb the risks and carry the losses, while institutions elsewhere retain control over the wealth.

The consequence is that boyhood itself becomes organised around possibility. Daily routines, schooling, family expenditure and social expectations increasingly revolve around football. Time that might otherwise be devoted to education, recreation or other forms of childhood becomes increasingly structured by training sessions, tournaments, travel and trials. Success promises extraordinary transformation. Failure can carry equally profound consequences.

One of the first casualties is often education. Many boys recruited into intensive academy systems, regional development programmes or overseas trials experience disrupted schooling or abandon formal education altogether in pursuit of professional careers that remain statistically improbable. While some academies provide excellent educational opportunities, many young players find themselves with limited qualifications should football not materialise. A childhood organised around one uncertain future may leave few alternatives when that future disappears.

The emotional and mental health consequences are equally significant. Adolescence is a critical period of psychological and social development, yet for many boys football gradually ceases to be an activity they enjoy and becomes the principal measure of their worth, identity and future. Selection can bring validation; rejection can produce profound experiences of grief, shame, anxiety, depression and identity loss after years in which football has become central to a young person’s sense of self. The pressures are intensified where entire families and communities have invested scarce financial resources and collective hope in one child. Boys may come to experience not only personal disappointment but a sense that they have failed those who sacrificed for them. The silence surrounding boys’ emotional wellbeing within elite football cultures, where resilience and toughness are often privileged over vulnerability, means that many struggle to seek support precisely when they need it most. Players released from academies frequently describe experiences of grief, shame, anxiety and identity loss after years in which football had become central to their sense of self. The families that have invested scarce resources may also experience disappointment , shame financial hardship,  societal pressure , further intensifying the emotional burden carried by the young player. As James Esson reminds us:

Football becomes more than a game. It becomes an imagined pathway out of poverty, unemployment and structural exclusion (Esson, 2015).

Migration compounds these vulnerabilities. Boys who leave home for academies or overseas trials must navigate unfamiliar languages, cultures and institutional environments during formative years of development. Separation from family networks can produce loneliness and isolation precisely when stable emotional support is most needed. Those who fail to secure contracts may return home carrying not only unrealised ambitions but also the weight of perceived failure within communities that had invested collective hope in their success.

Trafficking and the Shadow Football Economy

The speculative economy surrounding Afrikan football has also generated a shadow market that exploits the aspirations of boys and their families. Investigations by FIFPRO  (2023), the International Organization for Migration (IOM,2021) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2020) have documented how unlicensed agents, fraudulent academies and criminal intermediaries profit from the global demand for Afrikan football talent. Families are promised professional contracts, scholarships or trials in Europe in exchange for substantial fees, often selling livestock, land or borrowing money to finance what they believe is a child’s opportunity.

For many boys, these promises prove entirely fictitious. Some arrive in Europe or North Afrika to discover that no club is expecting them, no contract exists and no legal support has been arranged. Others are abandoned immediately after unsuccessful trials, left without accommodation, valid visas or financial resources. Unable to return home and fearful of admitting failure to families who have invested everything in them, some drift into undocumented migration, precarious labour or homelessness. In the most severe cases, investigative reports and international organisations have documented links between fraudulent football recruitment, traffickingnetworks and forced labour (see also Bouka,2021).

These practices should not be understood as unfortunate anomalies operating outside the football economy. Rather, they emerge from the same speculative logic that values future footballing potential before it materialises. Whenever children’s anticipated value becomes commercially significant, opportunities arise for actors willing to commodify hope itself. The trafficking of young footballers therefore represents not simply criminal behaviour but the darkest expression of a wider political economy that transforms Afrikan boyhood into an object of speculation

Importantly, these abuses should not obscure the many legitimate pathways through which Afrikan players migrate successfully to professional football. Most academies, clubs and licensed agents operate lawfully and potentially create good opportunities , for thousands of Afrikan youth. The point is not to criminalise football migration but to recognise that markets built around children’s future value inevitably create opportunities for exploitation unless robust systems of safeguarding, regulation and accountability are in place. Trafficking is not the opposite of the football economy; it is its shadow. Both emerge from the same exploitative, speculative valuation of Afrikan boyhood, although one operates within regulated markets and the other through criminal networks.

The existence of these abuses should not obscure the reality that most Afrikan football migration occurs through legitimate academies and regulated transfers. The point is rather that speculative childhood generates conditions in which exploitation becomes possible. Whenever future economic value is attached to children, markets emerge to profit from the hopes of families. The speculative economy therefore produces both extraordinary opportunities and profound vulnerabilities. Whenever futures become commodities, predation follows close behind.

Conclusion

James Esson names these unequal risks reveal a defining feature of the contemporary global football economy (Esson,2015). European clubs  minimise uncertainty by investing in large portfolios of young players, fully  and cynically aware that only a small proportion will ultimately succeed. Afrikan families, by contrast, often invest their limited financial resources, emotional energy and future aspirations in a single child. The probabilities may be similar, but the consequences are radically different. For the club, an unsuccessful prospect is one loss among many. For the family, it may represent years of sacrifice that cannot easily be recovered.

The football economy therefore socialises risk downward while concentrating reward upward. As indicated Afrikan families, communities and local institutions absorb the uncertainties of producing football talent, while the organisations that eventually commercialise that talent enter the process only after much of the developmental work has already been completed. Before the transfer market distributes wealth, childhood has already distributed risk.

Recognising this unequal burden of hope fundamentally changes how we understand both Afrikan football and Afrikan boyhood. The central question is no longer whether individual boys succeed or fail. It is why one of the world’s most profitable sporting industries continues to externalise the costs of producing football talent onto those least able to bear them. The celebrated mobility of the global game rests upon a quieter political economy in which care, sacrifice and social reproduction are systematically appropriated while the institutions that generate wealth remain elsewhere.

This is not simply an unequal market. It is an extractive one. Like earlier colonial economies that accumulated wealth through the appropriation of Afrikan land, labour and resources, the contemporary football economy increasingly accumulates value through the appropriation of socially produced human capability. The frontier of extraction has shifted. What is being anticipated, evaluated and commercialised is no longer only Afrikan labour, but Afrikan futures. Childhood itself becomes incorporated into circuits of global accumulation long before young people enter the labour market.

Football is often celebrated as a universal language of merit, mobility and opportunity. This article suggests a different reading. It is also a story about whose labour remains invisible, whose care remains uncompensated and whose hopes become available for commercial appropriation. The spectacle of the global game rests upon forms of social reproduction that rarely appear in balance sheets, transfer fees or television rights, despite constituting the indispensable foundation upon which football’s commercial success is built.

To recognise this is not to deny the transformative opportunities that football has created for many Afrikan players and their families. It is to insist that these individual successes cannot obscure the structural political economy that makes them possible. Before football becomes entertainment, it is extraction. Before it becomes commerce, it is care. Before there is a transfer market, there are households, mothers, communities and boys whose lives have already been reorganised around the demands of a global industry.

The scout arrives on Saturday.

The transfer market arrives years later.

But long before either,

Afrikan communities have already done the work.

(This article forms part of a series of four articles  on African football and global political economy. A companion article, Afrikan Football Economy Subsidising the World (Pheko, forthcoming)is being concurrently published.)

(By Lebohang Liepollo Pheko)

(Image Credit: Clint Strydom, “Transkei (4)” / Clint Strydom Photography)